On January 28, 2021 we celebrate the annual Data Privacy Day, an international event to empower individuals and encourage businesses to respect privacy, safeguard data and enable trust.
Anonyome Labs believes so much in people’s right to privacy that this year we are proudly one of Data Privacy Day’s proud sponsors.
Through our products, we empower people to determine what information they share, and how, when and with whom they share it. To us, being private doesn’t mean opting out of online services or hiding from the world, so we created MySudo app to help consumers protect their privacy, and Sudo Platform to help companies rapidly produce branded cyber safety solutions.
Data Privacy Day has never been more crucial to our highly connected world.
Data Privacy Day is a global effort that generates awareness about the importance of privacy, highlights easy ways to protect your personal information and reminds organizations that privacy is good for business. The annual event began in the United States and Canada in January 2008 as an extension of the Data Protection Day celebration in Europe. Data Protection Day commemorates the January 28, 1981, signing of Convention 108, the first legally binding international treaty dealing with privacy and data protection.
This year the event is imploring you as a consumer to “Own Your Privacy” which means acting to protect your valuable data online, and is encouraging businesses to “Respect privacy”, which advocates for holding organizations responsible for keeping individuals’ personal information safe from unauthorized access and ensuring fair, relevant and legitimate data collection and processing.
Privacy is now a major conversation on the global stage and, as we and many other experts predicted, is quickly becoming the defining issue of this decade. Here’s some proof:
- The data economy is reaching fever pitch, driven by an increasingly popular business model known as surveillance capitalism. Put simply, every action we perform online has become a piece of data which is used to coerce and constrain our digital experiences.
- As a result, consumers globally are becoming increasingly fed up with how many organizations, including global brands and especially Big Tech, are collecting, sharing and using their personal information for profit. Levels of consumer trust for brands is generally low, especially since there’s a growing awareness that so-called “anonymous data” is scarily simple to re-identify and data breaches are at an all-time high. A new demographic known as ‘Privacy actives’ is emerging and businesses everywhere must sit up and take note. If you’re reading this article, odds are you’re already a privacy active and your pioneering cohort is rapidly expanding.
- To help protect consumers, regulatory conditions are tightening and, increasingly, companies are being asked to rethink how to approach privacy in a rapidly changing landscape. California has the new Privacy Rights Act 2020 which tightens the screws on the California Consumer Privacy Act 2018 (CCPA) and establishes a watchdog agency to oversee and enforce privacy laws. We’re hopeful this will prompt more action towards national US legislation rather than a patchwork of state-by-state legislation. At the same time, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in full swing, with companies being fined for regulatory breaches. Other countries, such as Canada and Brazil, also have new or amended legislation.
- In all, a megaphone is being held up to the global data privacy conversation and we couldn’t be happier. Some high-profile moves are forcing data privacy further into the spotlight, like Apple’s new privacy labels and WhatsApp announcing new data sharing practices with its parent company Facebook and millions of consumers abandoning the app as a result.
So this Data Privacy Day, we encourage you to further explore the topic of data privacy and keep developing your understanding of exactly what organizations are doing with your personal information. If you’re already using MySudo, the world’s only all-in-one privacy solution, we applaud you. MySudo is your best defense against the growing data privacy crisis we’re proud to be fighting.
